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Here's one of the ways financial journalists lie to you -- by treating possibilities as certainties. On the front page of the New York Times this morning, reporters David Leonhardt and Vikas Bajaj begin by speculating about what might be a long-term decline in median home prices:

The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950.

Economists say the decline, which could be foreshadowed in a widely followed government price index to be released this week, will probably be modest ? from 1 percent to 2 percent ? but could continue in 2008 and 2009. Rather than being limited to the once-booming Northeast and California, price declines are also occurring in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Houston, where the increases of the last decade were modest by comparison.

Bad enough that what amounts to a mere forecast is couched in an anonymous passive voiuce -- "is expected" - and attributed to formless experts -- "Economists say..." What's worst, in the third paragraph of the story, the tone shifts what what is "expected" and what "could be" to what "is":

The reversal is particularly striking because many government officials and housing-industry executives had said that a nationwide decline would never happen, even though prices had fallen in some coastal areas as recently as the early 1990s.

Let's check in again in "2008 and 2009" and see what it turns out really "is." In the meantime, let Mr. Leonhardt and Mr. Bajaj label their economic guesses as such.

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